The Ontario election provides a new opportunity for unions

Ontario is 49 days from an election likely to deliver a change in government for the first time in nearly 15 years. This is also the first election fought under new campaign finance laws that are of particular interest for many of our labour union clients.  

The new campaign finance restrictions mean that the ability of unions to spend big on TV ads or large-scale public persuasion has ended. Setting aside the challenges this creates, I want to focus on the huge opportunities it provides.

Unions have a nearly unrestricted ability to communicate with and mobilize their membership during the upcoming election. So how are unions taking advantage of this? And what are the options with only a few weeks left before election day? Let’s find out below.

Text Messaging

With only a couple of days of setup time, you could be ready to have meaningful 1:1 communications with your membership. Hustle, the premier texting tool for campaigns, lets you message your members and then manage thousands and thousands of conversations via Hustle’s workflow.

Unions are using it to engage members around the election, collect pledges to vote and, closer to election day, to remind folks to vote early or cast their ballots on election day. Don’t have mobile numbers for your members? No problem. Hustle will search your data and separate mobile number from landlines. Don’t have staff time to be sending thousands of text messages? No problem. We can have your SMS program deployed via a call centre.

Mobile Canvassing

Nothing beats face-to-face conversations, which is why unions are turning to Organizer to help them run member-to-member canvassing. Organizer sync’s with NationBuilder or you can import your membership list as a .csv. Additionally, because of the deep integration with NationBuilder, the results of the canvass are recorded back into the profile of the members, so you’ll have that data in the long-term.

Photo credit: Michael Muraz